Powerful Questions for the DandDTrans Inquiry

A "community of inquiry and action" regarding the role that D&D can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time

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World Cafe Menu: +Powerful Questions | +What's Possible?

This conversation has completed its second round. Thank you to everyone who participated! Round 3 will be coming as we get closer to the final World Cafe in the last week of January.

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Round 2: Powerful Questions Conversation (completed)

What questions, if answered during our initial live World Cafe conversation on January 6th, might best serve us as a "community of inquiry and action" that is gathering through the end of the month?

Group 1

Names of participants (4 max please!):

Ben R.

Tom A

Tom C.,

Mark S

Posting suggestions:

Include your name and the date before each post

Be brief, and post one idea per paragraph, separating ideas with a blank line.

Use indenting and italics to indicate responses to what was posted previously in your group, placing your responses under the ideas they refer to.

Posts

[Ben Roberts, 12/29]

Some people have ~~assumed~~ suggested that our overall calling question should be the one we discuss in our initial World Cafe:

What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?

I wonder if, in order to work our way into this extremely challenging inquiry, we might do well to begin with something else, at least for the first of the three rounds on the Jan 6 call. Perhaps something like "what is working now that you are connected to or aware of?"

[Ben R, 12/30] I could also imagine a second round question that explores what participants know or/are involved in that is in motion for the near future that they believe might have transformational potential. This might build on the +Whats in Motion? inventory that is being developed as part of the +DandDTrans Open Space.

[Mark Spain 4 Jan] Ben, I think your What's in Motion? could be linked with Tom's first round question to make "What current dialogue projects do you know of that are transforming social systems in your community, including online?"

[Tom Atlee, 12/31]

Round 1: What current or past D&D initiatives do you believe can teach us important lessons about transforming social systems (like political, government, and economic systems)? Round 2: What did we all learn in the first round and how can we imagine reweaving all that into something even more powerful? (Tom Atlee, 12/31)

One of the main factors in my mind as I think about Jan 6 WC questions is what will "stir the pot" creatively to juice people's ideas and energy in preparation for the Open Space activities we'll be sponsoring. What WC inquiries will evoke/provoke/stimulate them to convene juicy OS sessions later?

[Ben R, 12/31 3pm ET]

Yes, Tom, I agree that "juicing the Open Space" would be one of the most valuable outcomes of the Jan 6 WC, and it makes sense, Art of Hosting-style, to design backwards form there. At the same time, there is your strategic call, echoed in Tom C's post below, to make sure that we look for actions that truly have transformational potential (and I would also add, that might have an impact in the relatively short term, given the urgency of these mega-crises). How might we frame things so that the OS topics that get initiated are more likely to reflect that level of thinking?

[Mark Spain 4 Jan] Tom, I think these are great questions for 2 rounds before Open Space.

[Ben R, 1/4] Welcome to this group, Mark! Does the second question of Tom's above refer to the 12/15 DandDTrans call? I'm thinking that many of the Jan 6 participants may not have been on it or taken the time to read the notes from it, so that might be a problem. [reposted below, in response to your additional comment suggesting similar questions to Tom's].

(Tom Christensen, 12/31)

If, as Einstein and others have suggested, we can't get there from here, then we have to get to somewhere else before we can make progress. This works, if that somewhere else is a different kind of cognition. So, rather than finding the best question, tho questioning can be a means, we need to draw forth, enact, create, discover, what else is possible when we have a shared intention, shared attention, and fearless openness when merging our being in a collective inquiry. I suggest, and I believe Bohmian dialogue, OpenSpaces, Cafe, promote this, that we find our way to a desireable state of being, together, and from that state, inquire into what we see as important from there. If we ask the question from our already, always there, normal state of being, we will be just doing more of the same....which is what got us in this problem space to begin with. We have to find what isn't normal, what is beyond normal, and let that way of being teach us, inform us, guide us. We might find what we need. We might not. But we know its not here......yet.

[Ben, 12/31, 2:40pm ET]

Hmmm, Tom... I hear you about not approaching a paradigm shift from within the framework that created the paradigm you wish to shift away from in the first place. And I do think it's possible to frame questions that are powerful enough to move us into a new framework--indeed that might be one definition of what a powerful question is (Peter Block's book "Community" has two passages on this distinction that I love, +excerpted here). The third principle of the World Cafe process is to "explore questions that matter," so either we come up with some that have this kind of power, or we are essentially saying that World Cafe as a process is inherently stuck in the old ways of thinking!

Hmmmm, Ben... I hear you :-) (& Block) about questions having their power. Maybe that is the synthesis of our thinking: Questions alone may not make any diff; questions designed to crack open the heart/mind and reveal what we can't know is there...those can make a diff. I would add that it may be the disruptive character of a great question, what it does to the parties conversing, that is a question's core value. For that impact to occur I suspect both parties have to have an uncommon level of openness in the conversation...the question has to get thru in a safe enuf context that it lands and an authentic reply occurs. So context is critical. And I think that is what is intended in all three inquiry modes here....to create a context, and also protocol, to make it highly likely disruption will occur. Why are you still reading this? Why did I write this? Disruptive, but just left me uneasy, not fully disrupted. I need practice. Will follow up on the below soon.

Indeed. And disruption is a surprisingly popular concept these days. I like Block's three qualities for a powerful question: it's personal, it's ambiguous, and it evokes anxiety! Also Peggy Holman's suggestion in +Engaging Emergence that we need to learn how to "disrupt coherence compassionately." Happy New Year! [12/31]

By the way Tom C., I just read your Intro, and given what you write there, I would love to hear what you have to say in response to Peter Block's +What's Possible? questions in the other currently active portion of this online World Cafe space! Oh, and welcome to DandDTrans! :-)

[Mark Spain 4 Jan]

Round 1. "What current dialogue projects do you know of that are transforming social systems in your ~~community~~ experience, including online?"

Round 2. "What was most curious for you in Round 1 that would open new possibilities?"

[Ben R, 1/4] Thanks for these suggestions, Mark! Re Q1: why limit it to "your community?" Aren't some of the most powerful conversations potentially global, or perhaps "translocal" (i.e. happening in more than one community at a time)?

Re Q2: As I noted above a little bit, I'm thinking that many of the Jan 6 participants may not have been active in Round 1, or taken the time to read the notes from it, so the second question might not work for them.

[Ben R, 1/4] What about a forward looking question for #2? Many ppts may have juicy plans for 2015, or at least ideas they are considering acting on. One of our core intentions is to help people with similar ideas for action to find each other and think about what they might do together.

[Mark Spain 5 Jan]

Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful observations Ben. I think I'm also not seeing the full picture of this whole process yet so I'm trying to imagine how many steps or phases there are from reflecting on concrete dialogue experiences in the past to stepping into the powerful and exciting purpose question "What do we as a community of dialogue practitioners have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact, in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?” Maybe this could be the Round 2 question? It may need framing to be grounded in both reality and possibility, moving from Round 1.

[Mark Spain 5 Jan]

Maybe in this asynchronous mode of collaborating it could be good to have a central visual list of events with a line between what is now past and completed what is current and alive and what is coming in the future? Anyone who joins at anytime can see where and how to fit in. (maybe this is not the place for this comment)

[Ben R., 1/5] Interesting idea, Mark. We have +the +Calls+ pad for the live portion, which does some of what you describe. I'm not sure how we would do it for hackpad, but I'm getting an inkling. It would be more of a "diary," I think, showing how things developed, which has been somewhat organic. It could also show what's being planned, although for the most part, these pads are probably set in their basic structure, with a few exceptions (although you never know what inspiration for additional complexity might seize me in the middle of the night!). The deeper challenge is integrating the two spaces--live and online. What you're describing could help with that too. I'm also reminded by this note that I haven't created a "feedback/questions/suggestions" pad, which is something I usually do for these spaces, as a place to put the kind of comment you just made. Hmmm....

Round 1: Questions Conversation

"Powerful Question" Suggestions.This round, now closed, was framed as follows: "please suggest one or more questions you feel, if answered, would help to move this inquiry forward most powerfully.what powerful questions you might want to discuss over the course of the DandTrans inquiry."

What are the mechanisms by which a whole country can be intelligent? [Tom Atlee, in +his post on the What's Possible? pad]

How might this subgroup of NCDD members provide suggestions for becoming immediately involved in one's own community with community leaders who are holding meetings and forums to help these efforts move toward transforming change? (First step for some members may be to become a regular participant of the group to have credibility).

How might we (process and organizational experts) self-organize ourselves into a robust, competent, and unique contributor to what appear to be the intractable, complex, social issues of our day? {from Linda Ellinor]

How do we distinguish between when it's important to have a clear idea what's happening and how possible interventions are likely to turn out, vs. when such knowledge is unlikely to ever emerge and we must simply dive in with our intuition and trust that we will learn and adjust as we go along? [from @John Abbe]

What are some examples of actionable strategic thinking that...

come from the heart and soul,

... dance with emergence, and...

... operate at the levels most likely to support systemic transformation?

[Ben Roberts]

If we looked back on this initiative after three years of successful efforts arising from it, what would we see? [Tom Atlee]

What could cause transformational conversations to go viral throughout society? [Tom Atlee] (Perhaps asked after "What makes a conversation transformational - for individuals, for groups, for communities, for societies?" [Tom Atlee] )

Through what dynamics can conversation take people from the suffering, conflict, and confusion of crises to the visioning and co-creation of new lives, cultures, and social systems that characterize the Great Turning? [Tom Atlee]

What would make Hackpad, Maestro, and such related technologies natural, easy, and valued tools in our individual and collective work? [asked by me, Tom Atlee, because they aren't such tools in my normal work.]

What would it mean to include absolutely everyone in these conversations, including people we might consider (stereotype?) as inherently antagonistic to this work (perhaps including Tea Partiers, corporate CEOs, public officials)? [John Backman]

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​​Round 2: Powerful Questions Conversation (completed)

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​​Round 1: Questions Conversation

Round 2: Powerful Questions Conversation (completed)

Round 1: Questions Conversation